When using other than the default diffuse materials, I am getting alot of fiery sparkles in my render. What do I do to cool these down, should I turn the samples way up?
Those are fireflies, and basically they are annoying.
They tend to appear when direct light is bounced ONCE off an object and then into the camera, causing a near reflection of the super-bright lightsource. Turning samples up sometimes makes them worse, so sometimes it is best to just render the image at lowish passes then remove the fireflies by hand (GIMP, Photoshop, even Microsoft paint does an OK job), after all they are just little 1 pixel dots all over the place.
Another good way to get rid of them is to make your light-sources larger and less bright, lowering the chance of getting reflections straight back into the camera.
Happy 2.6 Cycles/Tomato/everythingelsetheyputinthisweek
Thanks for the informative response. I will post process them out.